Why Vice 2.0 Will Fail Too
Updated: 3 days ago
We at Beacon of Speech hate reading books. Not because books are good, or bad, per se, but because we have the attention span of a 12 year old kid with ADHD, hyped up on sugar.
In an almost contradictory statement, we enjoy a good magazine long read.
Over at Pirate Wire, they rolled out with one of the best long-form reads you're ever going to come across: Inside the Coke-Fueled Rise and Fall of VICE
Now you're a youngin' with an attention span even shorter than mine? All you have to do is read the byline: The company didn't die because of investors, sexual harassment charges, or going 'woke' — it died because our founder stopped believing in the product that made us famous.
Almost the same exact day as Mitchell Jackson's article at Pirate Wire was released, Pitchfork rolled out with this: BrooklynVegan, Alt Press Hit With Mass Layoffs. Their money shot? "Music publications BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine have been gutted by parent company Veeps. Nearly all staff at each publication appear to have been laid off yesterday."
Who owns Veeps? These guys:
Who could have seen the death of Alternative Press coming?
Editor's Note: Actually, we did, from 2025: Now Alternative Press is Dead.
Where are we going with all this?
Back around 2010-2015, Vice and Buzzfeed News were two of the hottest New Media commodities in North America. Both were predicted to step toe-to-toe with Old Media Giants like ABC or CBS within a generation.
Instead, Vice, which started out as a glorified fanzine in Montreal, Canada, and was at one time worth 6 billion dollars, went bankrupt in 2023. Buzzfeed wasn't much better, crashing to Earth that same year after a 2 billion dollar valuation. Buzzfeed simply dissolved into its parent company in the end. Again, for those with short attention spans, let's highlight those two points in RED.
Vice: 6 BILLION to ZERO IN A DECADE.
Buzzfeed: 2 BILLION to ZERO IN A DECADE.
Vice, which has been running as a zombie website with no new content, has quietly started to drop fresh stories here and there at their home page. But every time you try to click on an article, this is what you get:
For story after story, you hit paywall after paywall.
We're going to make this short and sweet. If your "scrappy" little website STARTS with a paywall, it will not succeed.
In case you haven't noticed, everything is about twice a expensive as it was a decade ago. Let's specifically focus on Vice. Their assets include an archive and name recognition. That is worth something, but not worth buying a subscription.
In a world where food is twice as much as a decade ago....
Rent is twice as much....
And, basically, existing is twice as much....
Rebooting Vice is going to go about as well as rebooting MySpace....
Oh, and by the way, MySpace is teasing MySpace 3.0, coming soon.
Almost all "New Media" entities are going to find out that there's no money for them to survive. There are a lot of top heavy multinational corporations that don't understand that someone has to create new content.
Just 2 years ago, we wrote that Vice Australia was basically keeping its doors open with one writer churning out content like crazy. Her name? Arielle Richards.
She was let go by Vice Australia a few months after her co-workers. Today she has been reduced to writing stock copy at Australian Wire Services.
We would hire her in a second at Beacon of Speech...
If we had any sort of budget at all.
<sigh>
Comments